CMS report – August 2018

New training approach

We have decided to experiment with a new way to provide training to the Centre’s scientists. In the past CMS ran training days once or twice a year, with occasional half day sessions. This meant training might not happen frequently enough to be useful to Early Career Researchers who arrive at different times of the year. It is also logistically difficult to organise in-person training and expensive, with a lot of people having to travel.

In May the CMS team started weekly training sessions that were open to all Centre researchers. These are 1-hour sessions given via the video conferencing system and supported by CMS personnel at all nodes. This allows us to give more training sessions, on more subjects and to more people.

The training subjects focus on all aspects of computational systems, ranging from coding through to data analysis and data management. So far, we have delivered training on BASH shell, Git version control, and an introduction to the the xarray Python package. We are planning training on data management and data publication, climate models setup, NeCTAR cloud and more. We also welcome any suggestions on training that would be useful to Centre staff.

CMS Blog

As a complement to this training, we have started a weekly blog. Blogs posts will typically illustrate the answer to queries we receive on the climate_help@nci.org.au email help. For example a basic manipulation of data or an elegant solution to a common problem. These posts are aimed to help new students or post-docs getting started. You can find the blog here.

ACCESS preparation

In preparation for the next versions of ACCESS, the CMS team has now started using ACCESS-CM 2 and ACCESS-ESM 1.5. We are looking in detail at the setup and configuration in collaboration with CSIRO. This will allow us to be ready to support these models for the Centre once they are released and we will hopefully be able to guide users to modify the setup as required. We will also contribute any improvements we may find to the setup or configuration to the repository so all users can benefit from those improvements.